Thursday, 12 January 2017

How to keep Q4 paying off in 2017

Retailers love the influx of revenue in Q4, but there’s another, more last gift from the spike in digital traffic: data that you can use to your advantage in 2017.

In this post, we’ll cover three major ways to make Q4 the gift that keeps on giving.

1) Capture those audiences.

This is the time to build remarketing lists (put this in place ASAP if you haven’t yet; it’s never too late). You can then target these users at a later date to remarket to them if they haven’t converted.

Anyone adding to cart and abandoning, getting partway through the checkout process before bailing, just looking at product pages or even your home page…hit them with ads and promotions for post-holiday sales.

When building your remarketing lists, build them wisely; smartly segment them based on their interaction with your website.

The depth they go into your website gives you a better idea of the depth of their intent. Build the segments, bid accordingly, and tailor creative to speak more directly to the different audiences.

2) Go prospecting

Given that you have had a huge increase in customers from additional Q4 purchases, you’ve got more robust customer lists to use for prospecting for audiences similar to your customers. There are two ways I’d recommend to get started here:

Facebook Lookalike targeting is a great way to upload your customer list and target users with characteristics, behaviors, and traits similar to your customers. If you want to be even smarter with your LAL targeting, segment out those customer lists into close-knit groups. For example, an ecommerce clothing retailer would want to segment out those who purchased men’s vs. women’s clothing, those with high AOV (average order value) vs. low AOV, etc. This will allow you to better tailor creative to your audiences.

Google Customer Match offers similar functionality (albeit at a much lower scale). You can then use Customer Match with Google’s Similar Audience targeting to layer onto your search campaigns. By doing this, you can then bid more aggressively for users similar to the makeup of your customers searching for your product or service. This typically tends to generate higher conversion rates.

3) Re-engage

if you have multiple products to sell, natural upsells, or products that need to be regularly replaced or replenished, you can upload your new customer lists within Facebook’s custom audiences and target these users at a later time with new creative of different product, sales, promotions, etc.

You can also leverage Google’s Customer Match with GSP (Gmail Sponsored Promotions) to bring ads to your customers’ Gmail inbox to remind them about your great product, service, or deals and get them back to your site to make additional purchases.

Of course, these are techniques you should be using throughout the year, but there’s no time like now to take full advantage and keep the Q4 momentum going. Good luck!